I Don't Know Much, But I Know I Want to Love You

It's about two and a half miles from our house to where my husband's infuriating father is dying.  He was smart and funny, interested in literature and food and music, and also sorry for himself, and an ugly and brutal drunk, and horribly alone. He has finally arrived at the place he has spent the last two decades buying a ticket to: the ICU. I guess you could say he's almost six weeks sober, because he has been there, unconscious and on a ventilator, for 5 weeks and 6 days. When I go see him tomorrow morning, that will be the third time I'll have seen him during his stay.

Every number in that first paragraph enrages me. Or rather, those numbers break my heart.

It's tragic that we have lived so near but have had to keep him at a distance. It's tragic that he never had an upward trend in 20 years. It's tragic that alcohol worked well enough that he could keep one quarter-step ahead of his demons all that time. It's tragic that the end of his life was such a barrage of assaulting medical intervention that turned out to have no helpful effect. It's tragic that I didn't want to sit with him and ease his loneliness even that little tiny bit.

I've been angry with this man since the first I heard of him, but his death is only sad. My husband's brother says, "Dad's been dying for years." My husband says, "He'll live on as a cautionary tale." I say, "I really hoped it wouldn't end like this." And then my husband and his brother say, "Yeah, me too."

We wanted this to be a story about redemption. Not the religious kind of redemption but the ordinary kind, where crisis or maturity causes someone to see where he's been foolish and small and dangerous and wasteful, and for the most part the people he's harmed or terrified or embarrassed choose to let him become somebody slightly new. It's the kind of redemption the three of us who fall farther out on Terry's branch have each already experienced for ourselves, so we knew it could happen. We had no idea how to help it happen, and maybe thought maybe we'd maybe try something maybe later, and now later is totally off the table. What's here now is an accordion-folded packet of grief about all of the relationships that couldn't be, because Terry was so multiply and utterly impaired, regardless of all that was magnificent about him.

It's fair to say all poems are either about sex, or death, or both. It makes sense - those are the actions that bracket our lives. Our start is violent and confusing on the cellular level; if we are lucky, only on the cellular level. Our end is absolutely universally the same: one way or another, we stop getting oxygen to the brain - an outcome even the most beaten-down body is likely to fight. It's hard getting born and it's hard dying. It's hard watching somebody die who seemed to lack any wisdom, or even information, about how to live.


My husband and I stood on our front steps together for a few minutes this past Tuesday afternoon. We resolved to die better, which pretty much meant live better, for the sake of the children we love. We've made a good start: we tell each other the truth and rely on each other. We don't smoke cigarettes any more. We are eating better, moving more, drinking less alcohol, dreaming bigger. But more than anything else, we know our dying better would mean leaving children who know that they are cherished and worthy, who know that while life on Earth among people is messy and weird and astonishingly sad on a regular basis, embracing it and giving in to feeling about it and hoping for it is the only way to be. Dying better would mean having loved enough for a lifetime, while properly communicating that no lifetime would ever be enough time to love as much as we'd prefer.